Celebrate Your Failures
As interaction designers we’re in the business of figuring things out, and it’s a messy business. Throughout our career we experience two types of failures. The failure which we use as discovery tools to create, nurture, and extend the life of a product; and the failure which ultimately ends a product’s life. In this article I will be discussing the latter.
Failure is a lot like medicine, it tastes awful and makes us better — as long as we take it the right way. Let’s stop being ashamed of our failures and instead celebrate the wisdom they provide. I’ll start by telling you the story about one of my failures, the Facing Freedom web application.
Many years ago, through formative research and to the surprise of no one, The Chicago History Museum learned that most middle–and–high school students feel that American history is boring. To address this problem we researched and developed eight real, rare, and exciting American stories that resonate with an audience of 12 to 18 year olds. The eight stories are presented in the form of Facing Freedom, a physical American History exhibition at the Chicago History Museum, and a web application for teachers and students to use in the classroom.
The web application team involved several educators, two curators, an experience designer(your’s truly), a visual designer, and a developer. The educators included two Museum educators and an advisory group of ten middle-and-high school teachers from the Chicagoland area. Together we applied user-centered design principles to create the Facing Freedom web application.
We facilitated ideation sessions with teachers, and developed a prototype application. The prototype provided the eight stories, as well as two additional features: 1) Discuss History Today — enabled students to engage in dialogue with Museum historians about a contemporary topic, and 2) My Freedom Collection — a platform for students to create, interpret, and share their own collection of artifacts.
We contextually tested the prototype with teachers and students in their classroom, performed summative research via surveys and follow-up conversations, and refined the prototype until we were satisfied that it was providing its intended value. Once we reached that level of satisfaction, we shipped the Facing Freedom web application. Within a year of launch, the system crumbled.
The first symptom of failure was the removal of the Discuss History Today feature. Museum historians were not prepared to accept the additional workload caused by initiating and maintaining a dialogue with students. The second and final symptom was the removal of the My Freedom Collection feature. The feature was removed due to maintenance requirements that were not properly budgeted for. Facing Freedom no longer exists as a web application, it is now simply an informational website.
In retrospect the Facing Freedom web application failed for three major and related reasons:
- Our team was incomplete — we were missing key business stakeholders. We needed a team member(s) to represent institutional leadership. With them onboard we might have anticipated and addressed the financial and operational concerns early on.
- We miscalculated the application ecosystem — the application contained three types of users: teachers, students, and historians. We did a great job covering the teacher and student experience, but forgot to design for the historian.
- We didn’t adequately manage expectations — Museum leadership and fund raisers expected us to launch a web application, and move on to the next project. This mentality is understandable because museums focus on creating short–lived physical exhibitions, which are incredibly difficult and expensive to refine once they open to the public. However, that isn’t the case with web applications. Iterative and incremental design is the most cost-effective way to create and maintain them. Additionally, to create successful applications, you typically have to commit to them. Raising this awareness with leadership, would have helped to manage expectations across the board — including those of our team and users.
Creating a successful product is challenging. Failing early and often is part of the process, and sometimes a product ends in failure. It happens to the best of us — even giants like Google, Apple, and Amazon are not failure exempt. What’s important is that we learn from them and apply that wisdom to our future products. It’s unfortunate that Facing Freedom couldn’t live up to it’s potential, but I’m proud of the Museum and our team for creating it and doing our best to make it work. Reflecting on why it failed has taught me valuable lessons in communication, user experience design, and product development. So, lets celebrate our failures and share them with each other; they will only make us better.
If you’re curious about Facing Freedom, please visit http://facingfreedom.org. If you’d like to know more about our prototyping process for Facing Freedom, read Prototyping with Middle Schoolers.
